Category: Travel

LONDON--British environment secretary Caroline Spelman is expected to finalize plans before the close of 2011 to license dairy farmers to shoot badgers to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis.

According to a draft strategy released to media in July 2011, the cull would begin in 2012 in two trial areas, believed to be in Devon and Gloucestershire, though Spel-man told media that she was undecided about where the sites would be. After the initial trial, culling would proceed more aggressively for at least four years beginning in 2013. Read more

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2006:
BOSTON–Eighteen months after the Safe Air Travel for Animals
Act took effect, five years after becoming federal law, observers
are beginning to ask whether it serves any useful purpose.
The law requires airlines to report losses or deaths of pet
animals in transit, previously reported voluntarily.
“Since June 2005,” wrote Boston Globe reporter Peter J. Howe
on November 3, 2006, “airlines have reported only 74 pet incidents,
involving roughly just 0.01 percent of all animals carried in cargo
holds during that period, a review of reports filed at the U.S.
Transportation Department found.”

LONDON–Outsourcing animal research to nations where it
remains lightly regulated and non-controversial may accelerate with
the May 2005 decisions of British Airways, Air Mauritius, and Air
China to stop carrying animals who may be used in laboratories.
“I can confirm that Air China does not fly any laboratory
animals into the U.K. Our European offices also do not carry
primates and other animals destined for vivisection. There are now
no Air China flights worldwide carrying live animals for this
purpose,” said Lorna Allen, Air China marketing manager for Britain
and Ireland, in an e-mail posted at the Stop Huntingdon Animal
Cruelty web site.
Like other such policy decisions by national airways, the
Air China policy tends to encourage building labs and doing
experiments where the animals are, instead of moving animals to
existing labs which are often due for upgrade or replacement anyway.
As biotech work already draws heavily on personnel recruited
from Asia, the British Department of Trade & Industry is becoming
anxious about losing both breaking-edge research and routine animal
testing to Asian nations.

“Tourists visiting wildlife sanctuaries in Orissa state will
now have to turn vegetarian for the entire duration of their trip,”
Times of India News Network correspondent Rajaram Satapathy reported
from the Bengal coast city of Bhubaneswar in February.
“Concerned with rampant poaching, the state government has
banned cooking and eating non-vegetarian food in all 18 sanctuaries
in Orissa,” Satapaty elaborated. “The order, issued by the chief
conservator of forests, is being strictly implemented. Recently
more than 125 tourist vehicles, on a single day, were refused entry
into the Similipal Tiger Reserve because they were found carrying
meat and chicken for consumption.”
Taking an opposite view of diet on the opposite coast, South
Mumbai leaders of the neo-fascist Shiv Sena political party in
mid-April threatened to retaliate against Jain and Hindu vegetarian
housing cooperatives by opening stinking fish or chicken stalls
beside their buildings, wrote Haima Deshpande of the Indian Express.
Shiv Sena is a “party, movement and gang at once,” wrote
Julia M. Eckert in The Charisma of Direct Action: Power, Politics
and the Shiv Sena, recently published by Oxford University Press.
Build-ing a power base among disaffected Hindus of the meat-eating
middle classes and military castes, it was once the second strongest
faction within the Hindu nationalist coalition government headed by
the Bharatiya Janata party, but fell from influence after alienating
the Jains, Brahmins, and other vegetarian classes, along with the
Dalits, who are the poorest of the poor.

BEIJING–A camera trap set up by staff of the Hunchan Nature
Reserve in early February captured the first known photo of a wild
Amur tiger in northeastern China.
Members of the nature reserve staff positioned the camera
after hearing from a local farmer that an unknown large predator had
killed a mule that morning. The tiger tripped the electric eye that
operates the camera upon returning to the carcass late at night.
The photo provides “strong evidence that tigers are crossing
from the Russian Far East to repopulate previous tiger strongholds,”
said the Wildlife Conservation Society, whose equipment the Hunchan
team used.

BEIJING–A camera trap set up by staff of the Hunchan Nature
Reserve in early February captured the first known photo of a wild
Amur tiger in northeastern China.
Members of the nature reserve staff positioned the camera
after hearing from a local farmer that an unknown large predator had
killed a mule that morning. The tiger tripped the electric eye that
operates the camera upon returning to the carcass late at night.
The photo provides “strong evidence that tigers are crossing
from the Russian Far East to repopulate previous tiger strongholds,”
said the Wildlife Conservation Society, whose equipment the Hunchan
team used.
Best known for operating the Bronx Zoo, New York Aquarium,
Central Park Zoo, and Prospect Park Zoo, all in New York City, the
Wildlife Conservation Society applies the profits to funding
overseas field research.
If Amur tigers are finding suitable habitat in China, with
adequate wild prey and safety from poaching, the species may yet
survive a population crash in Siberia that has cut their numbers from
an estimated 400 in 1997 to just 190 at the end of 2002.

NEW YORK CITY–American Airlines on July 27 banned pit bull
terriers, Rottweilers, Doberman pinschers, and related mixed
breeds from all flights. Puppies from eight to 12 weeks of age are
excepted.
The ban took effect five days after a 68-pound pit bull broke
out of an approved molded plastic travel carrier en route from San
Diego to New York City, tore an 18-by-8-inch hole through a
fiberglas bulkhead, and chewed through four insulated cables in the
electronics bay of the plane, a Boeing 757.

Flying into Afghanistan on January 13, World Society for the
Protection of Animals international projects director John Walsh
drove straight to the Kabul Zoo with two colleagues and several
suitcases of veterinary supplies.
Few if any humane workers have helped more animals in more
places, under more dramatic circumstances, than John Walsh. A
former field officer for the Massachusetts SPCA, Walsh transferred
to the International Society for Animal Protection when it was spun
off as a subsidiary in 1964, and was soon literally immersed in
helping to carry an estimated 10,000 animals to safety from the
floodwaters behind a new dam in Surinam.

KAMPALA, Uganda
––Uganda Wildlife Authority
tourism manager Lilian Ajarova
on September 19 announced that
a fourth family of mountain gorillas
living in the Bwindi Impenetrable
Forest National Park has
nearly completed two years of
habituation to humans, and will
soon be ready for viewing.
This will boost Ugandan
gorilla tourism revenue by
$50,000 a month, Ajarova estimated.
Uganda allows tourists to
visit mountain gorilla families
only in escorted groups of six,
and has been able to accommodate
only 18 visitors per day.

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